• 4-week lead times normal with in-house manufacturing

  • 19 industry specific training videos to support your team
  • 32% faster setup with packaging, labelling, docs customised to suit you
  • $10,000s in add spare part revenue as parts branded in your name

Webtec manufactures 95% of its products in house. To machine metal parts in-house is a choice the company has always made. However, it hasn’t always been a popular approach in the flow power industry, where many companies chased the lowest-cost machinists around the world and subcontracted out the metal machining in the belief that this approach offered customers the lowest price.

Webtec specialises in making products in small-to-medium volume and there are few products manufactured in volumes greater than 10,000 pieces per year. But in some products there are nearly 10,000 variations possible depending on the customer’s configuration. The manufacturing layout reflects the diversity of the products that are made, and the flexibility needed to make a wide range of different variations on short lead times.

The company’s motto has been to minimise set-up times through investment in dedicated fixtures, robotically-loaded tooling and flexible manufacturing systems. In excess of £5 million worth of milling and turning centres which can run overnight when necessary gives the capacity to cope with peak demand. Since the engineering department is co-located with manufacturing, custom variations can quickly be modelled, prototyped and brought into production in a way that would be impossible if either of these functions were subcontracted.

Webtec believes that 4-week lead times (compared to the industry norm of 12 weeks), custom configuration and a stringent quality system can only be achieved by having all of these processes in house.

1) 168,000 gallons of fuel saved by one customer in a year

The Webtec three-port flow divider originally called the 2FV2V (a name it inherited from its Webster, later Danfoss, heritage) has become well renowned for splitting one flow into two and providing a pressure compensated priority flow. This is ideal for controlling the speed of a hydraulic motor or cylinder or cheaply adding a secondary function to a machine without affecting its primary purpose.

However, all flow control valves have a pressure drop which wastes energy through heat. As mobile machinery has grown larger and the flow rates have increased customers have requested flow dividers operate both at a higher flow and a higher pressure but also at the minimum possible pressure drop. Having listened to customers over the last 10 years the VFD120 and VFD190 flow dividers were launched offering 50% lower pressure drop than older models on the market plus boasting an operating pressure of up to 420 bar. This combination provides balanced control of the maximum hydraulic power likely on a medium sized mobile machine at the lowest operating cost.

Using a VFD flow control valve with a 10 bar lower differential pressure on a mobile mining machine which may operate eight hours a day, 250 days a year can result in massive fuel savings. This is equal to 350 gallons of fuel a year saved because of the reduction in pressure drop as well as the whole system operating at a lower temperature reduces the size of the radiator. A specialist mobile machinery company might make 40 machines a month, on this basis by changing this one valve to the VFD on all machines for a year can result in a massive 168,000 gallons of fuel saved per year.

2) $5000 saved in spare parts after just one use

The sceptical hydraulic service engineer armed with a glycerine pressure gauge once said he doesn’t need any ‘new technology’ as he can comfortably diagnose a fault with a hydraulic machine just by using his trusty pressure gauge and his experience. However, times have changed, and training schools emphasise that regardless of experience and to avoid mistakes you need to measure both hydraulic flow and pressure when troubleshooting mobile machines.

A slowly moving bucket on an excavator may appear at first to be caused by a damaged seal inside the cylinder. If a service engineer replaces the cylinder and the fault hasn’t disappeared then the next suspect may appear to be the pump, if they then replaced the pump and the fault still hasn’t disappeared.... you get the picture there is a very large cost in spare parts that have been replaced, not to mention the labour in doing so.

Using a hydraulic tester, the same service engineer can first test the flow going into the cylinder and at what pressure and see that as the cylinder is loaded the flow reduces and therefore the cylinder itself is not faulty. A second test of the flow coming out of the control valve bank might give a clue when the system is loaded using the built-in load valve, and the relief valve starts screeching. Closer investigation of the relief valve might show this was the faulty component. This spare part weighs just a few hundred grams and is replaceable in a matter of minutes at a fraction of the cost of a pump or cylinder or valve bank.

A Webtec 400 lpm  / 100 gpm hydraulic tester costs less than $5,000 but the total cost of the components that have been unnecessarily replaced based on the reading from a single pressure gauge could easily exceed $5,000. All Webtec hydraulic testers come with a five-year guarantee.

3) 243 man-hours saved in post-delivery product modifications 

Webtec’s customers, rightly, take great pride in the machines they build. This means that they want all components to look and work the way they want to give the best functionality for their users. It’s easy to understand an OEM’s motivation therefore in modifying a hydraulic valve after they have received it, to fit perfectly in the hydraulic system they are building. But any such changes come at a cost, firstly by invalidating the valve manufacturer’s warranty. Furthermore, the valve which originally cost $100 is now being booked out, modified in-house, possibly damaged or scrapped in the process, re-tested and then booked back in. Though this is rarely calculated, by the end the same valve probably cost $250!

About five years ago, during a visit in the foothills of the Rockies the sales team witnessed a great example of this by an OEM who designs world-class machinery for the oil and gas industry. On arrival the first thing the customer said was, they had been having some product failures. This was news to the team!

Over the next hour while touring their facility it transpired that the company wanted to make not one or two, but five different modifications to the valve, including special porting, different shape handle, anti-tamper features and different product marking all to suit their application. Some changes they were already making themselves and some they wanted to make in future. Their belief was that their only choice was to buy a standard product and modify it in-house. Therefore, they had never even asked.

Within 60 days of that meeting Webtec had made all five changes to the valve, they had been tested and approved. This made sure the company received the right product first time, eliminating the need for costly post-delivery custom mods and prevented all the product failures they had been seeing, which, as you might have guessed, had inadvertently been caused when modifying the products themselves.

4) 5 or more IoT projects in progress at any time to work in arduous environments

In industries such as mining, construction and refuse collection companies are looking to run machines autonomously or at least monitor them continuously, to predict failures before they occur and control the machine better during operation. This trend labelled ‘IoT or Industry 4.0’ gives an opportunity to improve performance, reduce running costs and improve safety.  The benefits of Digital BUS systems over a traditional 5V analogue output, have become increasingly obvious over the last ten years, with no signal attenuation and multiple ‘words’ of information sent simultaneously down the same cable.

Over the last few years, customers in these sectors have approached Webtec requesting CAN BUS versions of flow and temperature sensors that would work on their mobile machinery. Their challenge has been to find a product that gives an output that connects directly into their machines BUS system, without a secondary interface box, and a product which will fit and survive in the harsh environment that they operate.

It turns out that achieving both these things is not easy. New products and numerous projects in the final stages of multi-year trials with customers using flow and temperature sensors for use on high-pressure water and on high-pressure oil-hydraulic systems, demonstrate how this can be achieved. These systems are on mobile machinery with enormous temperature swings and massive vibration, with CAN Open and J1939 outputs and with custom porting and connections to interface smoothly with their system.

Such projects are hard and take time, true innovation is never easily won, and Webtec is proud to be trusted by and partner with world-class OEMs in helping to achieve Industry 4.0 in fluid power.

  • 19 industry specific training videos to support your team
  • 32% faster setup with packaging, labelling, docs customised to suit you
  • $10,000s in add spare part revenue as parts branded in your name
 

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